


Adventures in Bunkersitting

by Safiyabat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bunker Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-22
Updated: 2013-11-22
Packaged: 2018-01-02 09:25:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is frustrated in his attempt to pursue adventures of a literary nature.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adventures in Bunkersitting

**Author's Note:**

> This was in response to a prompt from tumblr user abstracted charm: i’d love to read a little thing about sam’s academic adventures in the bunker. i dunno, i just want to see sam just doing stuff like find books and read. 
> 
> Also, of course Sam can read French. He just can.
> 
> Supernatural and the characters from the show are not my property. I make no money from this or any other work of fan fiction.

I. 

Sam found it just after Cas made off with the angel tablet. He’d needed a win of some kind, any kind. Getting Dean back counted, of course, but the angry, sullen and silent Dean he’d gotten back really didn’t offer much in the way of companionship or comfort. Not that he should be thinking of comfort, not for himself. He wasn’t the one in need of comfort. He’d technically lost a sister – half-sister – third-sister? – but it wasn’t like they gave each other rides to school or braided each other’s hair. (Except they had, in a completely non-consenting and repulsive way.) Dean had lost his best friend, after being beaten close to death by said best friend, and there was something about mind control? Cas was surely hurting too wherever he was, because he’d been under someone else’s control and forced to beat his best friend to within an inch of his life and that was something Sam knew more about than he cared to contemplate more often than was strictly necessary thank you. And then there was Meg of course, the only person in the entire freaking universe who gave a crap what Sam felt or thought or went through in that whole time while he’d thought Dean dead. She’d loved Cas, and she’d died to further Cas’ mission even though she knew Cas as he was now probably couldn’t return her feelings. As these things went Sam’s need for comfort probably ranked lowest, to be honest. He was just sick, but he’d been sick for a while and had had plenty of time to adjust. He was just scared, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have some idea of where this was going before he undertook the Trials. He was just lonely, but hey – it wasn’t like he’d done anything to keep people around, right? Hell, he hadn’t even saved Meg. 

So when they got back to the bunker he let Dean tuck himself into bed, didn’t even try to make him talk or anything. Next he put some water on for tea and then he made his way into the library. He had every intention of doing some legitimate work-related reading. There had to be something in there related to Hell or Heaven or tablets somewhere, or how to Lojack an angel or something. Instead his eyes fell immediately to a decrepit volume in French. “Memoires de M. d’Artagnan, Captain Lieutenant de la Premiere Compangnie des Mousquetaires du Roi.” The hunter blinked. Was that… Mesmerized, he pulled it off the shelf. Indeed, with a few turns of the page he was proven correct. This volume, published in 1700, had been the source material upon which Dumas had based his Three Musketeers novels a century and a half later. Why this would have found its way into the Men of Letters library he had no idea, but the only responsible thing to do would be to read it and figure it out, right? The book followed him back into the kitchen while he fixed his tea and then into his bedroom. He didn’t last long, between the fatigues of the day and the supernatural disease coursing through his system. If his dreams were later populated with images of himself, Dean and Cas in rather a lot more lace than would typically be the case, and with swords rather than guns, well that was far and away better than the usual nightmare re-runs so he’d take it. Plus, Crowley made a pretty fantastic Richelieu. 

II.

Sam had made all the appropriate noises about feeling good about his life for the first time in forever and to some extent he was kind of telling the truth. No specific event loomed down upon him to make him say, “Can’t I just trade places with a battery-farmed chicken?” And back in the church he and Dean had actually spoken to each other, he’d admitted to Dean some of the things that had been weighing on him for a while now and it felt pretty good to get them off his heart. He wasn’t sure that they’d been talking about the same thing but hey – at least he’d been allowed a few words, right? 

The outcome of that whole fiasco still confused him. What had the point of that whole mess even been? He’d made himself so sick that he could still barely function. He was so tired that even just sitting in the Impala had him asleep in no time flat and maybe his aim was back but he hadn’t been able to do squat against Abaddon’s backup demons back in Oregon, he’d just been knocked out and laid there like a sponge. Tracy Bell’s words still rang in his head, about how he was the idiot kid who’d let Lucifer out of his cage. He’d put him back too, but that didn’t matter. The Apocalypse had done too much damage for just stopping it to earn him any forgiveness. He’d failed to kill Jake back at Cold Oak, and Jake had opened the Devil’s Gate. Maybe Abaddon would still be a problem now – she’d traveled forward in time from the sixties, right? – but she wouldn’t have such an easy time of it and so many cronies at her disposal if the floodgates hadn’t been opened. If Sam had managed to close Hell, none of this would be a problem. Irv would be alive, all the hunters Abaddon had tortured to death would still be alive, everyone Abaddon killed from this point on would still live and the fact that they were going to die was entirely on Sam. 

Dean had been very insistent that they press forward no matter what symptoms or obstacles popped up, and then he’d popped in and stopped him just before he’d finally finished them. Sam shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be back in the bunker at all, and his presence here meant that other people would suffer. How was he supposed to “feel good” about that? But the words seemed to make Dean feel good or whatever, so he said them and his brother looked away with a half-smile that wasn’t at all suspicious and went to go make dinner for them and the prophet.

Sam looked around himself. They’d gotten most of the furniture righted and at least all of the books and papers off the floor, but nothing had been put away. He shook his head. Kevin was good for a lot of things, he’d really pulled it out for them with that Navy cop, but he was prone to freaking out and when he was in mid freak-out he tended to let certain things slide. Apparently those “things” included things like personal hygiene and filing, which were equally essential in the hunter’s opinion. He grabbed a pile of books from the table and started putting them back on the shelves. There were books on angelology, books on demonology – really, Kevin? Wasn’t that kind of a dead horse? Books on herbal remedies and on… wiring? Okay… He shook his head. Finding a way to catalogue all these things would be the work of like, eighty lifetimes.

His eye caught something shiny as he re-shelved the wiring books. Well, it wasn’t exactly shiny – it was actually very dull. Dull brown, to be specific, with dull brown lettering on the spine. “Ivanhoe,” he read. Huh. He hadn’t picked up “Ivanhoe” since he’d been a kid, and he hadn’t been able to finish it either. His dad had bee absolutely livid when he’d found him reading a mere novel and made sure that all traces of the monstrosity were gone from the Impala. 

He glanced around. Kevin had sneaked off to wherever he hid during the day. Dean was doing Dean things somewhere deep in the bowels of the bunker. He snaked a larger volume of angelology off a shelf just in case and sat back down at the table, cracking open the elderly novel. He got maybe half an hour before Dean came back. “Sammy, you going to sit here all day?” he demanded. 

The Trials had weakened the younger Winchester but his reflexes were still plenty fast. He had enough time to hide the novel behind the tome without being overly obvious. “What do you need, Dean?” he asked in as open and eager a tone as he could muster. 

“Storage room 8-C isn’t going to inventory itself, man. We have no idea what’s down there. We should know if our house is going to eat us or something.”

Sam smiled and forced his legs to hold him up. He really wished his brother would stop referring to this place as their “house.” It wasn’t a house. It was a workplace, and it was a hole in the ground. It was a hole in the ground with a lot of books, to include some surprising books, but not a home. “I’ll be right there.” He moved down the hallway to deposit the books into the room he currently used as a bedroom. He hid the book behind some of the file boxes he’d never cleared out, because even though Dean had never been in here there was a first time for everything.

III.

Cas had left. Cas had left because he felt he was endangering them and if that wasn’t the stupidest thing Sam had ever heard it was pretty close. It was right up there with “I’m keeping that from you for your own protection” and “No one still holds that against you, Sammy, least of all me.” What the hell kind of crap was that? Angels could get into the bunker of course, but only with permission, with help. They couldn’t just storm the place, it was too heavily warded. The bunker was the safest place in the world for the newly human Cas. It was the only safe place in the world for the newly human Cas, or Clarence, or whatever he was calling himself these days. And he’d just walked away. How stupid could this situation get?

He hadn’t thought he could get angry like this anymore.

He needed to calm down. No, what he needed to do was accomplish something. He’d learned that much when he’d been in Kermit. It had only taken him what, twenty-nine years to figure it out? He’d spent most of his life being told he wasn’t good at much besides arguing. That it was Dean who was good with his hands, that it was his father who could put things together again. It had all been crap of course. Dean was good with his hands, of course, but his father had never been good for much besides destruction. He’d always been good at things like stitches but in Kermit he’d learned that he was actually pretty good at repairs, too. He’d taken broken things like air conditioners and washing machines and lawn mowers and he’d made them go again, just as good as they’d been when new and sometimes even better. He’d probably never match Dean’s prowess with motor vehicles and to be honest he didn’t want to but he sure as Hell didn’t need to go running to big brother every time the car started running a little funny.

Not, of course, that he had his own car. Or ever would. 

What he did have was this whirly-gig light-up panel that reminded him of something from the set of the original Star Trek. Kevin had said that it had lit up like a Christmas tree when the angels fell. Maybe they could use it to track angel movements and keep Cas safer that way? He removed a panel from the back and began following wires. 

After a couple of hours he had a plan, and a layout, and an older brother who had actually flinched when he mentioned tracking angels. What had Dean so jumpy at the mention of the word “angel” these days? He outlined his plan, though, and while Dean seemed a little uncomfortable he ultimately agreed to help. The Men of Letters had this ancient computer, though, that apparently ran on wishes and pixie dust because nothing from those days should have run so cool or been so small and shouldn’t there have been punch cards somewhere? He expressed some frustration with the machine and that was all it took to have Dean reaching for his phone.

Honestly, Sam could have figured it out. It wasn’t like it was save-the-world critical or anything, or like Charlie was any more likely to have the first clue how the thing ran than he was. But he was trying very hard to make it easier for his brother to deal with him, to show his gratitude to Dean for everything he’d sacrificed for him, and so he said nothing. Besides, Charlie was working a full-time job now wasn’t she? This would be the perfect time for him to catch up on “Game of Thrones.” He sneaked off to his room without too much regret. Dean knocked on his door no less than half an hour later. “Company’s here, little brother!” he called. 

Sam chucked his book into the cardboard archive boxes across from his bed. How had the woman gotten here from freaking Topeka so quickly? 

IV.

Sam made his way through the bunker and wallowed in the blessed silence. He didn’t want to get his hopes up. He’d been burned before, after all. It was true that the bunker offered more privacy than motel living and anything at all was more private than squeezing two or three guys into the Impala and expecting them to live out of that for a while. (Maybe something smaller, like a Yugo or something, would offer even less privacy but he was pretty sure that they wouldn’t actually be able to fit him into a Yugo so that was off the table.) He didn’t need to deal in quite such a personal way with the sounds made by Kevin’s frankly delicate digestive system or with Dean’s insistence on re-writing every song performed by Rush. Still, for all that the bunker was a large facility it still seemed like he had someone in his face every minute. Dean watched him like a hawk, and was that really necessary? He’d been clean for four years or maybe five thousand years depending on your math, the fact that they had a demon locked in the basement didn’t mean he was about to go looking for a snack. (If there were a demon that merited being drained dry it was Crowley, but he really wasn’t worth the comedown.)

For now, though, no one made a sound. No one at all. “Dean?” he called. No response. “Kevin?” Still no response, although the kid might just be nursing a prune juice and vodka hangover. Apparently the life of a prophet and the life of a hunter meshed well in some respects. He grinned. He had some time… 

The book came out. “The Marvelous Land of Oz.” He’d been plowing through the rest of the Oz books ever since he’d found out that they were some facsimile of real. He’d actually kind of liked Dorothy – not in a sexual way, he was pretty sure she was more Charlie’s type and anyway he really had nothing to offer – but she kicked ass and was smart and independent and really, that was what he liked in people. He opened the book, flipped to the first page and –

\- And the most atrocious buzzing sound filled the air. He looked around only to find Dean’s phone, abandoned on the table. He sighed and considered shooting it. It would serve Dean right for leaving his crap lying around and interrupting his book time. At the same time, it might be someone calling with a case. It might be Cas, in trouble and needing help. 

He slammed the book shut and got up to answer it.

V. 

Sam crept silently into the dungeon. He carried a sleeping bag and a couple of pillows under one arm and a shaded lantern in the other. Crowley raised an eyebrow at the sight of him in his pajamas. “A slumber party, Moose?” he rumbled. “Can’t say I pegged you for the type but if you insist.”

Sam set his burdens down in the corner farthest from the demon. He pulled the gun out of his waistband. “All right. See these? Angel blade bullets. I figure if an angel blade works on a demon the bullets will too.” 

Crowley frowned. “Where did you get those?” 

“I took them from you, what did you think?” He made himself a comfortable nest in the corner.

“You won’t actually kill me, Moose. You still want the names of all those demons.” He smirked.

“Right now, Crowley, I want some peace and quiet more. This is the only place I can get it, so it’s what I have to do. They know I hate you more than I hate – well, almost everything – so they’ll never even think of looking for me here. I’m going to sit here and read my books, and you’re going to shut up or I’ll put a hole in your neck and shut you up. Got it?”

Crowley blinked. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

Sam huddled under a blanket with his bedroll and picked up where he’d left off with “The Marvelous Land of Oz. “

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Demons Aren't Mice (but Neither are they Men)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1237744) by [ohjustdisarmalready](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohjustdisarmalready/pseuds/ohjustdisarmalready)




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